The Tao of Anarchy: There is no God. There is no State. They are all superstitions that are established by the power-hunger psychopaths to divide, rule, and enslave us. It's only you and me, we are all true and real existence though in one short life. That is, We all are capable to freely interact with one another without coercion from anyone. We all are capable to take self-responsibility to find ways to live with one another in liberty, equality, harmony, and happiness before leaving this world forever. We all were born free and equal among all beings on this planet. We are not imprisoned in and by a place with a political name just because we were born there by bio-accident and social-chance. We are not chained to a set of indoctrinated beliefs that have been imposed upon us by so-called traditions. This Planet is home to all of us. No one owns it. We share the benefits from and responsibility to this Earth. We pledge no oath, no allegiance to no one; submit to no authority. We are all free and equal. The only obligation we all must undertake constantly with consistency is to respect the same freedoms and rights of others.

The World to Come by Chris Hedges

The ruling elites are painfully aware that the foundations of
American power are rotting. The outsourcing of manufacturing in the
United States and the plunging of over half the population into poverty
will, they know, not be reversed. The self-destructive government
shutdown has been only one of numerous assaults on the efficiency of the
administrative state. The failing roads, bridges and public
transportation are making commerce and communications more difficult.
The soaring government deficit,
now almost a trillion dollars thanks to the Trump administration’s
massive corporate tax cuts, cannot be eliminated. The seizure of the
financial system by global speculators ensures, sooner rather than
later, another financial meltdown. The dysfunction of democratic
institutions, which vomit up con artists such as Donald Trump and hold
as alternatives inept, corporate-indentured politicians such as Joe
Biden and Nancy Pelosi, is cementing into place a new authoritarianism.
The hollowing out of the pillars of the state, including the diplomatic
corps and regulatory agencies, leaves the blunt force of the military as
the only response to foreign disputes and fuels endless and futile
foreign wars.

Just as ominous as the visible rot is the internal decay. Among all
social classes there is a loss of faith in the government, widespread
frustration, a sense of stagnation and entrapment, bitterness over
unfulfilled expectations and promises, and a merging of fact and fiction
so that civil and political discourse is no longer rooted in reality.
The nation’s isolation by its traditional allies and its inability,
especially in the face of environmental catastrophe, to articulate
rational and visionary policies have shattered the mystique that is
vital to power. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure
becomes flagrantly artificial,” George Orwell wrote. “That is when its
ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by
force or fraud.” Our elites have exhausted fraud. Force is all they have
left.

The United States is a wounded beast, bellowing and thrashing in its
death throes. It can inflict tremendous damage, but it cannot recover.
These are the last, agonizing days of the American Empire. The death
blow will come when the dollar is dropped as the world’s reserve currency, a process already underway. The value of the dollar will plummet, setting off a severe depression and demanding instant contraction of the military overseas.

Seth A. Klarman, who runs the Baupost Group hedge fund, which manages about $27 billion, just sent a sobering 22-page letter
to his investors. He pointed out that the nation’s ratio of government
debt to gross domestic product from 2008 to 2017 exceeded 100 percent
and is close to that in France, Canada, Britain and Spain. The debt
crisis, he warned, could be the “seeds” of the next financial crisis. He
decried the global unraveling of “social cohesion,” adding, “It can’t
be business as usual amid constant protests, riots, shutdowns and
escalating social tensions.”

“There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will
inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical
debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can
afford,” he said in the letter. “By the time such a crisis hits, it will
likely be too late to get our house in order.”

The ruling elites, worried about impending financial collapse, are
scrambling to cement into place harsh legal and physical forms of
control to stymie what they fear could be widespread popular unrest,
nascent forms of which can be seen in the strikes carried out by
American teachers and the protests by the “yellow vests” in France.

The ruling ideology of neoliberalism,
the ruling elites recognize, has been discredited across the political
spectrum. This is forcing the elites to make unsavory alliances with
neofascists, who in the United States are represented by the Christian
right. This Christianized fascism is swiftly filling Trump’s ideological
void. It is embodied in figures such as Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Brett
Kavanaugh and Betsy DeVoss.

In its most virulent form, one that will be expressed once the
economy goes into crisis, this Christian fascism will seek to purge the
society of those branded as social deviants, including immigrants,
Muslims, “secular humanist” artists and intellectuals, feminists, gays
and lesbians, Native Americans and criminals—largely poor people of
color—based on a perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible.
Abortion will be illegal. The death penalty will be mandated for a
variety of crimes. Education will be dominated by white supremacist
views of history, indoctrination and the teaching of creationism or
“intelligent design.” The pantheon of new America heroes will include
Robert E. Lee, Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. The state will portray
the white majority as victims.

This Christian fascism, like all forms of totalitarianism, wraps
itself in a cloying piety, promising moral as well as physical renewal.
The degradation of mass culture with its celebration of sexual sadism,
graphic violence and personal dysfunction, its plagues of opioid
addiction, suicide, gambling and alcoholism, along with social chaos and
government dysfunction, will lend credibility to the Christian
fascists’ promise of a return to a “Christian” purity. The cloak of this
piety will be used to snuff out all civil liberties.

Central to any totalitarian ideology is a constant inquisition
against supposedly clandestine and sinister groups held responsible for
the country’s demise. Conspiracy theories, which already color Trump’s
worldview, will proliferate. The ruling rhetoric will whipsaw the
population, swinging from championing individualism and personal freedom
to calling for abject subservience to those who claim to speak for the
nation and God, from the sanctity of life to advocating the death
penalty, unrestrained police violence and militarism, from love and
compassion to the fear of being branded a heretic or traitor. A
grotesque hypermasculinity will be celebrated. Violence will be held up
as the mechanism to cleanse the society and the world of evil. Facts
will be erased or altered. Lies will become true. Political language
will be cognitive dissonance. The more the country declines, the more
the paranoia and collective insanity will grow. All of these elements
are present in varying forms within the culture and our failed
democracy. They will become pronounced as the country unravels and the
disease of totalitarianism spreads.

The ruling oligarchs, as in all failed states, will retreat into
fortified compounds, many of which they are already preparing, where
they will have access to basic services, health care, education, water,
electricity and security largely denied to the wider population. The
central government will be reduced to its most basic functions—internal
and external security and collecting taxes. Severe poverty will cripple
the lives of most citizens. Any essential service once provided by the
state, from utilities to basic policing, will be privatized, expensive
and inaccessible to those without resources. Trash will pile up in the
streets. Crime will explode. The electrical grid and water
systems—decrepit, poorly maintained and run by corporations—will
repeatedly turn on and off.

The mass media will become nakedly Orwellian, chatting endlessly
about a bright future and pretending America remains a great superpower.
It will substitute political gossip for news—a corruption already far
advanced—while insisting that the country is in an economic recovery or
about to enter one. It will refuse to address ever-worsening social
inequality, political and environmental deterioration and military
debacles. Its primary role will be to peddle illusions so that an
atomized public, fixated on its electronic screens, will be diverted
from the collapse and see its plight as personal rather than collective.
Dissent will become more difficult as critics are censored and attacked
as responsible for the decline. Hate groups and hate crimes will
proliferate and be tacitly empowered and condoned by the state. Mass
shootings will be commonplace. The weak—especially children, women, the
disabled, the sick and the elderly—will be exploited, abandoned or
abused. The strong will be omnipotent.

There will still be money to be made. Corporations will sell anything
for a profit—security, dwindling food supplies, fossil fuel, water,
electricity, education, medical care, transportation—forcing citizens
into debt peonage that will see their meager assets seized when they
can’t make payments. The prison population, already the largest in the
world, will expand along with the number of citizens forced to wear
electronic monitors 24 hours a day. Big corporations will pay no income
tax or at best a symbolic tax. They will be above the law, able to abuse
and underpay workers and poison the environment without oversight or
regulation.

As income inequality becomes more massive, financial titans such as
Jeff Bezos, worth some $140 billion, will increasingly function as
modern-day slaveholders. They will preside over financial empires where
impoverished employees will live in run-down campers and trailer parks
while toiling 12 hours a day in vast, poorly ventilated warehouses.
These employees, paid subsistence wages, will be constantly recorded,
tracked and monitored by digital devices. They will be fired when the
punishing work conditions cripple their health. For many Amazon
employees the future is now.

Work will be a form of serfdom for all but the upper elites and
managers. Jeffrey Pfeffer in his book “Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern
Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can
Do About It” quotes a survey in which 61 percent of employees said
workplace stress had made them ill and 7 percent said they required
hospitalization as a result. The stress of overwork, he writes, may
cause 120,000 deaths annually in the United States. In China there are
an estimated 1 million deaths a year from overwork.

This is the world the elites are preparing for by setting in place
legal mechanisms and internal security forces to strip us of liberty.

We, too, must begin to prepare for this dystopia, not only to ensure
our survival but to build mechanisms to blunt and attempt to overthrow
the totalitarian power the elites expect to wield. Alexander Herzen,
speaking to a group of anarchists a century ago about how to overthrow
the Russian czar, reminded his listeners that it was their job not to
save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We
are the disease.” All efforts to reform the American system is
capitulation. No progressive in the Democratic Party is going to rise
up, take control of the party and save us. There is one ruling party.
The corporate party. It may engage in petty, internecine warfare, as it
did in the recent government shutdown. It may squabble over power and
the spoils of power. It may come wrapped in more tolerant stances
regarding women, LGBT rights and the dignity of people of color, but on
the fundamental issues of war, internal security and corporate
domination there is no divergence.

We must carry out organized civil disobedience and forms of
non-cooperation to weaken corporate power. We must use, as in France,
widespread and sustained social unrest to push back against the designs
of our corporate masters. We must sever ourselves from reliance on
corporations in order to build independent, sustainable communities and
alternative forms of power. The less we need corporations the freer we
will become. This will be true in every aspect of our lives, including
food production, education, journalism, artistic expression and work.
Life will have to be communal. No one, unless he or she is part of the
ruling elite, will have the resources to survive alone.

The longer we pretend this dystopian world is not imminent, the more
unprepared and disempowered we will be. The ruling elite’s goal is to
keep us entertained, frightened and passive while they build draconian
structures of oppression grounded in this dark reality. It is up to us
to pit power against power. Ours against theirs. Even if we cannot alter
the larger culture, we can at least create self-sustaining enclaves
where we can approximate freedom. We can keep alive the burning embers
of a world based on mutual aid rather than mutual exploitation. And
this, given what lies in front of us, will be a victory.